


Between the Shadow and the Soul

by Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-28
Updated: 2013-03-09
Packaged: 2017-12-03 20:33:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/702360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap/pseuds/Hellcat_Spangled_Shimmer_Trap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Sam are on a ghost hunt when they find an innocent victim. Being the who they are, they of course take care of her, but there's more to her than meets the eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My apologies for picking the most cliche title ever. I know original character fics are frowned upon, but I make no apologies, I'm just fucking around over here. Can't have Dean fucking Cas ALL the time.

The first thing Dean noticed was her hair, blacker and longer and thicker than anything he had ever seen. It lay scattered in the snow in loose ribbons, hypnotically and utterly black. Her skin was not merely pale; it was deadly, bloodlessly white, only her lips were so flushed with color that they seemed to have robbed the rest of her of any life. Her full mouth was half-parted as if in hesitation. It was her utter helplessness that made his heart contract with involuntary pity, the way her arms and legs lay powerlessly graceful in her unconsciousness, the way her thin dress clung to her body. He found himself on his knees beside her, lifting her. She was incredibly light, as if her bones were hollow. Her head fell against his shoulder, delicate, shallow breathing on the skin of his neck. 

“Sam!” he called, as he came up to the car.

“What’s up?” Sam asked, running up. “Who is she?” as he saw the burden in Dean’s arms.

“She was lying in the snow over there,” he said, jerking his head. With one hand, he fished the car keys out of his pocket and tossed them to Sam, who barely caught them in surprise. “You drive, I’ll stay in the back with her.”

Sam gave him a questioning look, but didn’t say anything about it. Dean laid the girl down across the back seat, her head in his lap. Her limbs seemed to fall into a conscious attitude of infinite grace and poise in her unconscious state. He pushed the hair from her face, examining the fine, defined and delicate features. Her soft, cold skin and depths of charcoal hair enticed him, making him terribly aware that he was holding a living, breakable thing. He wanted to support the gentle weight of her for hours, for days, there was something infinitely calming about her unbroken breathing. But they were driving up to the motel, and he pulled her into his arms again and carried her in.

He put the girl down on his bed, where she seemed to melt slightly into the mattress. Sam brought over a glass of water and Dean soaked a towel in it and ran it over her forehead. She gave a light, sad moaning sigh and moved her head fretfully. Her eyes half-opened and she stiffened and sat up, staring at them with now wide-open eyes, so dark that they looked black. 

“Hey, it’s okay,” Sam said, with his “concerned good guy” frown. “You’re safe here.”

She stared at them without speaking, drawing herself in upon herself. 

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” Dean said, reaching out and touching her arm, which she jerked away. “You were passed out when we found you.”

“The thing I saw in the house,” she finally said, “what was that?”

Her voice was low for a woman, with a slight rasp, but Dean found it unbearably sultry. Her accent surprised him, it was definitely English, rounded and polished.

“You’re not gonna believe it,” Sam said.

“It was a ghost,” Dean said bluntly.

She just looked at him. She wasn’t offended, she didn’t laugh, she didn’t think they were fucking around. She surveyed him with deadly earnestness.

“That’s interesting,” she commented coolly.

Before either of them quite knew how it happened, they were all sitting around the table, a bottle of whiskey between them, and they were explaining to the girl how to burn ghosts out of existence.

“So you do this a lot?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s uh, kind of our job,” Dean said.

“I’m never going to believe another word about unemployment in America,” she said. “So maybe you could introduce yourselves?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sam said, and Dean flushed at the realization that he hadn’t even told her their names. “I’m Sam Winchester and this is my brother Dean.”

She nodded while taking a swig from the whiskey bottle. “Elaine Heathford,” she said, holding out her hand to Dean first. He took it, and her long, slender fingers contracted on his with surprising strength. He looked up at her face and they grinned at each other as she set the bottle down. 

She was visiting a cousin on a farm outside Albany, but was given the wrong directions at the airport, took the wrong bus, and wound up at the house Sam and Dean were investigating. It was her first time in America, “and frankly,” she commented, “I hope that it’s my last. Your whiskey is nowhere near as good as I was led to expect.”

Dean offered her a ride to Albany, which she refused, saying that she would take the bus. She said she had more than enough money, at which point it transpired that her purse had been lost. Despite finding herself stranded in the middle of nowhere in New York with no money, she was far from giving way to despair.

“Fuck!” she yelled, making both Dean and Sam jump as she jumped up aggressively and paced around the room like a cat in a tiny cage. “How does this happen to me?!”

“Hey, it’s okay,” Sam said, stepping forward as if to calm her, but left the gesture unfinished. “We’ll get you to Albany and help you find your cousin.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Dean felt compelled to add. “We’ll take you there first thing tomorrow, after we get this ghost tonight.”

“You’re burning the bones tonight?” she asked, turning curious. “Can I come?”

“No,” Dean cried, more in protest than in command.

“It could be very dangerous,” Sam explained in response to her raised eyebrows.

“I think I can stand a bit of excitement,” she said.

Despite Sam and Dean’s protests, two hours later, they were sitting in the Impala with Elaine in the back seat. Dean had Led Zeppelin II in the cassette player and as soon as the music started, Elaine exclaimed, “Zeppelin, that’s great!” and leaning forward, reached between the two brothers for the volume, turned it up to headsplittingly-loud almost tumbling into Dean’s lap in the process, and climbed back to her spot. Dean glanced at her in the rearview mirror as she sang along to the guitar solo in “Heartbreaker”, throwing back her head, dancing in her seat. He smiled and stepped on the accelerator. 

It was cold outside, and the wind sighing between the graves didn’t help. Elaine shivered, wrapped in Dean’s coat. 

“Okay,” Dean said, “we split up and look for the grave.”

“This place is huge, it’s gonna take all night,” Sam commented.

“You got a better idea?” Dean asked. “Let’s go.”

Five minutes later, he heard Elaine whisper his name. He jumped and spun around. She had approached completely silently, and there was not much that could sneak up on him.

“I found it,” she said.

*******************************************

“How did you do it so fast?” Dean asked as they all stood around the gravestone. 

“There was a map,” Elaine said.


	2. Chapter 2

The motel’s cheap heating system was humming and growling, drowning out the measured breathing of the sleeping occupants of the room. Dean was sprawled in an armchair near the window, having given up the attempts to sleep. He had given up his bed for Elaine, who lay curled up in the blankets. Her face was turned towards the window and a stripe of moonlight lay across it. Dean got up and stood over the bed. These moments of quiet and peace were ones he usually dreaded, when action and motion and adrenaline were not there to keep the memories out. He needed his work, when there was a goal and a way to reach it, no looking around and wondering and remembering, just a straight road down which he had to run as fast as possible. The nights when he couldn’t sleep were torture, his mind swarmed with flashes of horror, his muscles clung to actions he couldn’t bear to examine. But tonight, his head was as peaceful as the soft snowfall outside, as the steady breathing of the girl in the bed. There was nothing in the world besides the stripes of moonlight painted across the room and Elaine’s black and white beauty; black hair, white skin, black lips, white blankets. The moonlight drained everything of color, maybe that’s why it was all so simple. He looked at her until she disintegrated into flat lines that formed the likeness of a human face, then even that likeness faded away. The past did not matter at all, it lay quietly in the back of his mind. 

Dean recalled Morgana standing over the grave as he and Sam dug, keeping watch, her long hair tucked inside his coat that she kept wrapped close around her. There was something pleasurable in the knowledge that it was his coat she was using, as if his body was keeping her warm. It was so gentle and so teasingly lovely, and the feeling sank deeper into his bones. When he thought of touching her, he didn’t think of porn star sex moves, or the feeling of her long fingers on him, but of her thick black hair, thought of burying his fingers in it, of drowning in it. He wanted to vanish in its suffocating and all-consuming blackness until he was unseen, absolved. He touched a strand of the hair, lying on the bed, and it was silky and heavy. It was so absolutely black that every color in the world was contained in it and swallowed up by it. His coat was now around his own shoulders and her scent clung to it; clean earth and fresh delicate flowers. Yet her innocence was infinitely tainted somehow, he felt that she looked right through him and knew everything he had done and didn’t care. These were all things she couldn’t know, of course, but somehow, it didn’t matter. Tomorrow, she would be gone from his life forever. It seemed so strange and random that they had met and now they must part. Soon, she would be getting out of the car, waving over her shoulder and leaving his life forever. It felt unreal to consider how briefly their separate existences had touched and how they would separate again. Sleep was pressing on his eyes and he sprawled in the chair again and the gentle and immovable weight of sleep descended on him like a falling curtain closing on all the pain. For the first time in months, he slept dreamlessly.

They started late, after a noon “breakfast” of leftover cherry pie. Dean and Morgana had had a vociferous argument the night before about which flavor of pie was best as they were driving back from the burning. The three of them piled into the Impala, Dean feeling overburdened with sleep. He darted quick glances in the rearview mirror to look at Morgana in the back. She was looking drearily out of the window. The excited, fevered flush of yesterday was gone, replaced with a listless, tired expression. Dean felt the same. It was an hour’s drive to Albany, and then it was goodbye forever. He had nothing to say.

There were only a few minutes of emptiness when Dean’s phone rang. Everyone in the car stirred with slight interest as Dean pulled it out of his jacket and looked briefly at the number. It was Cas.

“Hey, what’s going on?” Dean asked.

“Dean, I need your help,” Cas’s solemn, worried voice sounded over the phone. “There’s a vampire in Florida that – “

“Whoa, whoa, slow down!” Dean cried. “We’re in New York.”

“Where are you?”

“In New York, I just told – “

“No, where exactly?”

“On 87 on the way to Albany – “

Before Dean had even stopped speaking, there was a rustle and a swooping sound and Cas materialized in the back seat. Morgana gasped and scrambled away from him, while Cas leaned forward towards Dean.

“I need your help with this,”

“Dude, we’re taking this girl back to Albany – “

“I’m sorry, Dean,” Cas said, and the next second all the occupants of the car, except Cas, who had disappeared, gave cries of shock and fear, and the car swerved precariously as Dean struggled to get it under control. They were driving down a completely different highway, winding through lush swamps of green on either side. 

“Fuck!” Dean yelled, hitting the dashboard with his open palm in frustration. “He teleported our asses all the way to fucking Florida!”

Morgana moaned and fell sideways across the back seat.

“Remind me to never come to America again,” she lamented.


End file.
